FeatureSuggestions
Contents
Margin Notes
Scenario: Notes/Comments in a writer document are difficult to find and read
We need to put our notes expanded in the margins so we can see them. See the summer of code project for this.
Photo Album
Scenario: Photos get taken at a wedding
Part 1 is to be able to quickly turn them into a presentation to show at the wedding dinner a few hours later. The key features are to be able to create a presentation from the pictures with 3 to 4 clicks with random fades between slides, and the presentation automatically set to loop continuously. Impress Photo Album Creator is a fine starting place for this. Needs to be at least turned into a complete addon which can be installed from the addon menu.
Part 2 is to be able to export such a presentation into a video format of some kind, so it can then be imported into some 3rd party DVD writing software to burn as a playable DVD as a gift for the non-techy not computer owning wedding couple.
Blogger
Scenario: Blog editing with word processor features
Writer can create tables, insert images and spell check. There exists a plugin for Microsoft Word, Blogger for Word which only supports basic functionality for blogging from MSWord, a superior solution for Writer would be nice. oooblogger is a good starting position, support for more blogger backends is required, and support for media uploads to support inserted images needs to be completed. Improving the responsiveness of the "edit existing blogs" and a preview in a brower would also be nice additions.
Browse Online Addons
Scenario: Make it easy to find good quality addons
From the Add-Ons dialog add the ability to browse a pre-defined online location where Add-Ons can be found. www.ooomacros.org exists as a possible starting point. The proposed Add-Ons collection would need to be strictly quality controlled to work on all platforms, and to not require any user installation work except possibly restarting OOo. The brower of Add-Ons should show a summary of the Add-On and the ability to view the documentation URL of each Add-On before determining whether to download and install it.
Wikipedia Smart Tags
Scenario: Find articles in wikipedia from topics in your document.
The idea is that openoffice.org would automatically look up phrases in your document (possibly automatically, or possibly only at a users direction) in wikipedia and see if they have an article written about this content, if so highlight them with a special link which takes you to the wikipedia article about it. e.g. reading a document about Russian History and "Peter the Great" automatically link to background information about Peter on wikipedia. Or firefox style, a sidebar accumulates the links.
Better Template Dialog
Scenario: Creating a document should start with selecting a picture of the type of document you are going to write
We have a create from template wizard for impress, this is a suitable route for creating a word processor document as well. The existing impress dialog is a bit klunky and doesn't by default contain many examples for openoffice.org. The Apple iWork suite has nice templates and a nice selector widget. So we need a better template dialog like the iWork one, and ideally with the ability to browse an online set of quality controlled templates. documentation.openoffice.org contains a starting position, but some selection of best of breed needs to be done as well as seperation by language and theme, cleanup in terms of setting titles and licences and generation of previews. AppleTemplateDialog.png
Tackle FAQs
Scenario: Known FAQ problems
e.g. we know that users find it difficult to do certain tasks because they have become FAQs. So we should tackle these known FAQs with new approaches, e.g. creating a title page in writer is a common problem. So we should e.g. by default dock the styles browser when using writer to make it more obvious that styles exist, making it more likely that they will be discovered. Another approach for writer is to take the impress approach and create a side panel which shows a preview of all the pages in the document, in this panel right clicking the first page should allow the most common task of applying the title style to the page, selecting the first two pages should enable the auto creation of a first page style and a second page style with all the appropiate follow styles set to create a "first two pages do not have headers/footers and page 1 starts on the third normal style page" Writersidepanel.png
Help Agent Notification
Scenario: Help Agent activation is overly-intrusive
e.g. When the help agent is triggered due to some feature occurring e.g autocorrect getting triggered. The help agent appears in the bottom right of the page, noone ever clicks on it and it stays there annoyingly. Perhaps a better solution would be to use the GNOME notification area and for a fixed period show the text of the tip there instead which explains what has taken place, and disappear it after some short period of time. Uncluttering the main application window.
There have been some discussions on the mail lists:
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=discuss&msgNo=57241
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=discuss&msgNo=59619
See also the Help Agent Wiki page.
Keynote-style transitions
Scenario: Making OOo Impress presentations even more impressive
I saw a few days ago someone doing a keynote speech using Apple's Keynote presentation software. Is it possible to integrate that amazing animation functionality to Impress? I think it would be an excellent feature to make our presentations even more impressive.
Scenario: Less clicks, previewing effects before clicking to apply
Office 2003 displays a preview of the style in the menu, and Office 2007 will do hover previews on styles, font size, font, and probably other things. I don't think OOo needs to get much from Office 2007 but these 2 features are neat. I don't have an issue with the toolbar set up right now (mine are custom and extremely slimmed down); I have memorized most every icon and hardly ever use the menus.
All icons on the toolbar should have a hover effect (translucent color, something 3d, etc), it just helps out as far accessibility goes and also can add some cool aesthetics effects.
Paragraph toolbar
Scenario: More toolbar, less dialog box
A toolbar with paragraph options that are displayed in the Paragraph Options dialog box would be extremely useful. Things needed would be indenting and spacing of course, but not just simple button to get general ones such as Single, Double, etc. I'd love to see an input text box to enter things like 12pt or 0.17" for each item (customizable which ones appear of course). I do not think the alignment buttons should be moved from the General toolbar however.
Subversion
Scenario: Centralized storage and enabling teams to work on the same document at the same time.
An extension on the already existing version control of OpenOffice.
